[ Solved ] Linux Mint 20.1 Mate partition install issues

[jbh911]

I've installed Linux Mint 20.1 Mate to an ACER Aspire ZC-106 with UEFI: American Megatrends and resulted in
/dev/sda1 EFI System Partition fat32 /boot/efi , and
/dev/sda2 ext4 / - a 469 GB partition.
With LM 20.1 on a USB stick and using GParted I reconfigured /dev/sda2 partition, reducing the / to 35GB and setup the Swap, /home and Snapshot partitions.
Attempted a re-install with / & /home partitions formatted ext4 and selected /dev/sda1 for the Grub location and was presented with a message - this system requires "Reserved BIOS boot area" of 1 MB must be established or a boot failure may result.
An unallocated 1 MB partition appeared. Selected Reserved BIOS boot area from drop down menu and selected Prim & Sec partition but failed to get that partition established. Pressed ahead with the re-installed but the re-boot failed - with grub rescue.
Q1. How do you setup this 1MB "Reserved BIOS boot area" partition?
Q2. How do I recover from the grub rescue position?

[SMG]

I'm not sure I understand your reason for installing twice, but it sounds like to me that you did not point the second install to your existing EFI partition? I'm not sure and I may not be the best person to help you with the issue. However, here is a video of installing with UEFI HOW TO INSTALL LINUX MINT 20.1 "ULYSSA" UEFI MODE + GPT 2021 and maybe it will help. (Note the root partition should be at least 30GB (not 20GB as in the video) for LM20.)

[AndyMH]

selected /dev/sda1 for the Grub location

You select the device not the partition, i.e. sda.

this system requires "Reserved BIOS boot area" of 1 MB must be established or a boot failure may result.

I suspect your first error may have confused the installer, this message indicates you are trying to install in legacy mode on a gpt format drive. It wants somewhere to install grub = 1MB partition with the flag bios_grub set.

Delete the bios_grub partition and try again. Install with something else pointing the installer at the partitions you created for / and /home and this time tell it to put grub on sda not sda1.

[jbh911]

Success thanks to SMG & AndyMH. The video is excellent and introduced me to the partition table approach, which I'd steered clear of in the past..
The reason I opted for a re-install was to ensure the /home partition was recognised.
Thanks again, much appreciated, just so easy.